MediaTek working on Cortex-A53 quad and octa-core chips

18 February, 2014

MediaTek chipsets may have a bit of a reputation for being mid-range but you have to give it to the young company – it moves fast. It was the first to jump on ARM's new core, the Cortex-A17, and will be among the first to use the 64-bit Cortex-A53.

Leaked documents show MediaTek is working on the MT6732 and MT6752, quad and octa-core chipsets respectively. The Cortex-A53 core is based on the new instruction set, ARMv8, and should offer a performance boost over Cortex-A7 at the same clockspeed with similar low-power usage.

It's impressive that MediaTek's chipsets will have on-board LTE support (including the Chinese flavor), which so far only Qualcomm has managed (Samsung, Intel and NVIDIA use separate LTE modems; Apple uses Qualcomm tech).

The new chipsets aren't official yet and so there are no devices announced with it, but then there's nothing with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 410 (quad-core A53 + Adreno 306) either. One thing is for sure though, other chipset makers need to step up the game.